Ian Cheng
bbrraattss
USA | 2013 3’ | Digital | Color | Stereo Screening: Digital video file
Motion capture choreography simulated against motion capture choreography.
Sabine Gruffat
A Return to The Return to Reason
USA | 2014 3’ | 35 mm | Silent Screening: Digital video file
A scratch film for the 21st Century where 35mm black leader is meticulously etched frame by frame using a digital laser cutter (a machine designed for precision carpentry). A Return to The Return to Reason is a conceptual and materialist tribute to Man Ray’s 1923 film Le Retour à La Raison (A Return to Reason), the first film to use the 'Rayograph' technique in which Man Ray exposed found objects onto film negative.
Hope Tucker
The Sea [is still] Around Us
USA | 2012 4’ | Digital | Color | Stereo Screening: Digital video file
A postcard usually enhances the reality. The contrast is more stark in Corinna, Maine, a former woolen mill town on the shores of Lake Sebasticook, where years of dumping of industrial waste contaminated the water supply. In 1964, E.B. White mourned his fellow Mainer Rachel Carson and the altered ecology of Sebasticook. Rachel Carson is dead, but the sea is still around us. This small lake is a sad reminder of what is taking place, to some degree, all over the land, from carelessness, shortsightedness, and arrogance. It is our pool of shame in this, “our particular instant of time.” Carson’s work mobilized the public and led to the formation of the US Environmental Protection Agency. Yet local people continued to seek regulation and revival of Sebasticook for twenty more years before the EPA began cleaning up Corinna.
James Sansing
Verses
USA | 2012 6’ | 35 mm | Silent Screening: Digital video file
Verses is a film that animates counselors’ logs that were found in an abandoned juvenile detention center. The ink stains and mold growth thread their way through the veins of the paper, making Rorschach patterns. This natural phenomenon illustrates the psychological aspect of this institution’s affect on the youth who were detained there.
Janie Geiser
Arbor
USA | 2012 7’ | 16 mm | Color | Stereo Screening: Digital video file
From a set of photographs found in a thrift store, Geiser creates a liminal space between representation and abstraction, figure and landscape, fiction and memory. Arbor suggests the fragility and ephemerality of memory and its artifacts through subtle manipulations of the photographs: reframings, layerings, inversions, and the introduction of dimensional elements, including flowers and leaves. The photographs’ subjects rarely engage the camera; they are glimpsed, rather than seen. They look elsewhere, and wait for something inevitable. Gathering on a hillside, lounging on the grass beyond now-lost trees, the inhabitants of Arbor cycle through their one elusive afternoon, gradually succumbing to time or dissolving into landscape, reserving for themselves what we can’t know - and becoming shadows in their own stories.
Julie Murray
Distance
Ireland - USA | 2010 12’ | 16 mm | Color | Stereo Screening: Digital video file
Time spent at two shores, one thinly populated, the other a wasteland, joined by the interluency of various paths taken, each bit real enough, though exact measures being obscurely indicated. Notions of home and its ache are, to borrow a phrase, “not capable of being told unless by far-off hints and adumbrations”.
Joel Wanek
Sun Song
USA | 2014 14’ | Digital | Silent Screening: Digital video file
A poetic journey from the darkness of early dawn into the brightness of the midday sun in the American South. Filmed entirely on the number 16 bus route in Durham, North Carolina over the course of six months, Sun Song is a celebration of light and a meditation on leaving.
Rob Todd
Undergrowth
USA | 2011 12’ | 16 mm | Color | Stereo Screening: Digital video file
A blind predator dreams through its prey's eyes. The obvious predator is a barred owl, but the film uses this as a vehicle to consider the active role of the camera in image "capture". The prey is undefined, but suggested as a compendium of natural figures that the camera "captures".
Laura Heit
The Deep Dark
USA | 2011 7’ | Digital | Color | Stereo Screening: Digital video file
An elliptical cinematic song cycle, The Deep Dark journeys into the psyche with animation, projected shadows, and ethereal vocal incantations.
Charlotte Pryce
A Study in Natural Magic
USA | 2013 3’ | 16 mm | Color | Silent Screening: Digital video file
Witness an alchemist’s spell:
the transmutation of light
into substance.
A glimpse of gold.
Mark Toscano
Rating Dogs From A Scale of 1 to 10
USA | 2012 2’3’’ | 16 mm | Color | Stereo Screening: Digital video file
Truth as held to be self-evident, however inconsequential or ludicrously subjective. Truth as not a matter of opinion. A meaningless game of arbitrary pronouncements that hopes to suggest other contexts in which similar games are far more insidious, while still giving viewers a good time. Ultimately though, a film that is probably too delightful to be anything but cute.
Kevin Jerome Everson
Century
USA | 2012 7’ | 16 mm | Color | Stereo Screening: Digital video file
Century consists of a General Motors’ automobile, a Buick Century, meeting its fate. General Motors’ doors, quarter panels, trunks, hoods and roofs were created at the defunct stamping plant in my hometown of Mansfield, Ohio.
David Dinnell
Program Director, Ann Arbor Film Festival. David Dinnell is a filmmaker and programmer based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA. He has programmed for the Ann Arbor Film Festival since 2006, becoming Program Director in 2010. Previously he was the Film Programmer for the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Union Theatre for five seasons and was Program Director of the Media City Film Festival (Windsor, Canada) for its 11th and 12th editions. He has curated special programs for the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, California Institute for the Arts, the Wisconsin Film Festival, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Etiuda & Anima Film Festival in Krakow, among other venues. He is the co-programmer for the 2014 fall edition of the Flaherty NYC Series at Anthology Film Archives, New York. His moving image work has been exhibited at various international venues including the International Film Festival Rotterdam, EXiS (Experimental Film & Video Festival in Seoul), Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival (Czech Republic), Images Festival (Toronto) and the New York Film Festival’s Views from the Avant Garde.
Ian Cheng
Born in 1984, Los Angeles. Received his education from UC Berkeley and Columbia University. His work has been exhibited at the New Museum, New York; The 12th Lyon Biennial, Lyon; Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami; Greene Naftali Gallery, New York; PS1 MoMA, New York; Sculpture Center, New York; Formalist Sidewalk Poetry Club, Miami Beach; International Film Festival Rotterdam; and Migrating Forms, New York; with recent solo exhibitions at La Triennale di Milano, Milan; Standard (Oslo), Oslo; Frieze London; Off Vendome, Dusseldorf; and Vanity, Los Angeles. Sabine Gruffat
Digital media artist and filmmaker living and working in North Carolina. Currently she is Assistant Professor of Art at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Sabine's films and videos have screened at festivals worldwide including the Image Forum Festival in Japan, Migrating Forms in New York, several editions of the Ann Arbor Film Festival among others and her feature film I Have Always Been A Dreamer has screened internationally including at the Viennale, MoMA, Cinéma du Réel at the Centre Pompidou, and The Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival. She has also produced digital media works for public spaces as well as interactive installations that have been shown at the Zolla Lieberman Gallery in Chicago, Art In General, Devotion Gallery, PS1 Contemporary Art Museum, and Hudson Franklin in New York. She is currently producing a feature documentary with Bill Brown about the housing crisis in Spain. Hope Tucker
Transforms what we know as a daily form of narrative through THE OBITUARY PROJECT, a compendium of contemporary salvage ethnography that documents the passing of cultural markers and ways of being. She has animated cyanotypes of American downwinders; recorded mobile phone footage of the last public phone booths in Finland; retraced the path of protest that closed the only nuclear power plant in Austria; and written the text of a video out of paper clips, a Norwegian symbol of nonviolent resistance. Screenings and exhibitions include the 21er Haus, Vienna; ar/ge kunst Galeria Museo, Bolzano; Gene Siskel Film Center, Chicago; International Film Festival Rotterdam; New York Film Festival’s Views from the Avant-Garde; Punto de Vista, Festival Internacional de Cine Documental de Navarra; Vox Populi Gallery, Philadelphia; Zagreb Dox; and five editions of the Ann Arbor Film Festival. James Sansing
San Francisco Bay Area artist, working in sculpture, photography, painting and experimental film. His films have screened at International Film Festival Rotterdam, Pacific Film Archive, New York Film Festival, Anthology Film Archives, Media City Film Festival, and Images Festival in addition to the Ann Arbor Film Festival, where Verses received the 50th AAFF Audience Award. Sansing has exhibited at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco and Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito, California and has had solo shows at Ampersand International Arts and Mark Wolfe Contemporary in San Francisco and is the recipient of several art residencies and fellowships. Janie Geiser
Internationally recognized experimental filmmaker and visual/theater artist, whose work is known for its sense of mystery, its detailed evocation of self-contained worlds, and its strength of design. Her films have been screened at Redcat, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, Pacific Film Archives, the Wexner Center for the Arts, the San Francisco Cinematheque, Los Angeles Filmforum, and at numerous film international film festivals. Her film The Red Book was selected for the U.S. National Film Registry of the Library of Congress, and her film The Fourth Watch was selected by Film Comment as one of the top ten experimental films of the last decade. A Guggenheim fellow, Geiser is also an Obie Award-winning director, and a pioneer in the renaissance of American experimental puppet theater. She creates innovative, hypnotic works that integrate puppets and performing objects with live performers and film. Julie Murray
Studied Fine Art in Dublin, Ireland and moved to the US in 1985. She has made more than twenty-five films and digital artworks since 1986 which have been exhibited at numerous international venues including the New York Film Festival, the Hong Kong International Film Festival, the International Film Festival Rotterdam, Centre George Pompidou (Paris), and the London Film Festival. Her work was featured in the 2004 edition of the Whitney Biennial and her films are part of the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Murray has had numerous solo screenings at venues around the world including REDCAT (Los Angeles), Anthology Film Archives, Media City Film Festival, Pacific Film Archives, Los Angeles Filmforum, the San Francisco Cinematheque and Cinematheque Ontario (Toronto). Her films have been included in many editions of the Ann Arbor Film Festival including the 47th AAFF where her film Elements (2008) received the Best Cinematography award. Joel Wanek
Cilmmaker and photographer based in Oakland. His work has been shown in many film festivals, galleries and publications throughout North America and Europe. Over the years he has developed a creative documentary practice that often blurs the line between subject and maker, mixes techniques of narrative and vérité modes and utilizes public spaces for collaborative engagement. Recent shows include the Rencontres Internationales Paris, International Film Festival Rotterdam, BFI London Film Festival, La Nuit De L'Instant ,Images Festival and the 52nd Ann Arbor Film Festival where Sun Song received the Best Cinematography Award. Joel holds a MFA in Experimental and Documentary Arts from Duke University and a BA in Photography and Filmmaking from Webster University. Robert Todd
A lyrical filmmaker as well as a sound and visual artist, Robert Todd continually produces short works that resist categorization. In the past sixteen years he has produced a large body of short-to-medium format films that have been exhibited internationally at a wide variety of venues and festivals including thirteen editions of the Ann Arbor Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, Media City Festival, San Francisco International Film Festival, Rotterdam International Film Festival, New York Film Festival, Les Rencontres Internationales, Black Maria Film Festival, Nouveau Cinema in Montreal, Cinematheque Ontario, the Harvard Film Archive, Pacific Film Archive, and the Paris Biennale. His films have won numerous festival prizes, grants, and artist's awards. He has taught film production at Boston College, the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Art Institute of Boston, University of Massachusetts, and the Boston Film and Video Foundation. He has also worked as editor, sound designer/editor, post-supervisor or music producer on various award-winning broadcast and theatrically-released media programs. Laura Heit
Artist who works in animated art and performance. She employs stop-motion, live-action puppetry, hand drawing, and computer animation in her short films. Her work has screened extensively at museums and film festivals around the world including; Walker Arts Center, Moma, Guggenheim, Anthology Film Archives, Millennium Film Workshop, Annecy, Rotterdam, Taiwan, Ann Arbor, and London 
